Musical comedy

I saw something the other night that reminded me of the Spanish, nearly 500 years ago, going into Central America and coming over the hills and petrifying the natives with two horrors nobody in the New World had ever seen. One was a monster called a cannon, the other was a living monster called a horse.

What I saw the other evening was a brilliant theatrical representation of a whole flock of similar horrors that terrified the Japanese on a famous, or infamous, day in July 1853. They were looking out into the bay of what we know as Tokyo and saw on the horizon what many of them took to be huge sea dragons snorting fire and smoke, every bit as terrifying, I imagine, as Godzilla – is it? – or any of those monsters in Japanese horror movies that rise from inland lakes and gobble up the rather condescending American scientists who have the gall to titter at the simple peasants who warned them against just such Loch-y-Nessy monsters. 

The monsters gliding towards Tokyo on that summer day of 1853 were, in fact, an American armed squadron, including a new steam frigate and they anchored in the bay. This is the famous incident that, in American school history books, is known as the 'Opening of Japan' to the Western world though as a celebrated Irish-American commented later, 'We didn't go in, they came out'. 

I could cut short the history bit right there, for fear that you were already reaching for the knob. I could say, quite flatly, that we are talking about, or are going to, American musical comedy but what I think I have to say will make more sense later if you'll bear with me for a minute or two and we go on with the story of the Americans crashing into Tokyo Bay. 

The Americans were not the first, by any means, who'd tried to encourage the Japanese to break with their obstinate isolation from the rest of the world. You have to go back to the early 1600s when Europeans were busy on some of the Seven Seas trying to explore, exploit or colonise old lands and new. The Japanese would have none of them. They knew what the Spanish had done to the natives and the native culture of America and they expelled the first Spanish and Portuguese, they made the British give up their only trading post, they told their own shipbuilders not to build anything big enough for overseas trade and they locked themselves in their islands. 

There were about 100,000 Christians, native and foreign, still left and being nothing if not thorough, the Japanese rulers massacred more than half of them. Thirty-odd thousand escaped to a castle fortress and dug in for three months. They surrendered in the end and, on coming out, were systematically slaughtered to a man. After that, the ruling clan of Japan forbade all foreign travel and, for 200 years, maintained the habit of executing foreigners who came in or had the ill luck even to drift in from a shipwreck. 

But by the middle of the last century the British, the Russians and the Americans kept begging the clan to open up to foreign trade. They said no. It was the United States that decided to force the issue and steamed into Tokyo Bay with that frightening fleet. However, the American commander was a tactful invader. First, he left his proposals on the beach, so to speak, and sailed off to China to give them time to think it over. He came back eight months later. The Japanese decided to say yes. There was an elaborate exchange of gifts, the Japanese offering brocade and rare lacquers, the Americans presenting such marvels as telegraph instruments, new farming gadgets, a miniature locomotive and several barrels of rye whisky. This was Japan's first taste of the pleasures and profit of progress, or corruption, or whatever you care to call it. 

The Japanese, with their marvellous gift for oohing and aahing over some breathtaking foreign invention and then, in no time, improving on it, the Japanese, within 50 years of their terror at seeing an armed squadron, had challenged and thrashed the Russian navy. Within a hundred years, they had surpassed the Germans in the manufacture of exquisite optical instruments and I don't need to make you wince by getting out a list of all the technological and other wizardries in which, today, they either equal or excel us. 

Well, what has all this to do with American musical comedy? My dear friends, you have just been privileged to hear the plot of a new American musical comedy that is a startling – and maybe as historic – a breakthrough in its own line as Commodore Perry's breakthrough in international trade. I'd better say at once that the musical is called 'Pacific Overtures' and, in many more things than its plot, strikes me as the sort of landmark in the history of American musical comedy that 'Oklahoma' was in the 1940s. 

'Landmark' is a bold word. Show business is populated with people who live in a frenzy of tiny shocks and fashions. They tend to make discoveries – a new actress, a new restaurant – that are described as 'fabulous' or 'fantastic' but are not very good. A landmark in musical comedy is something so minute that I once heard a theatre director so describe the day they took the floppy bows off the shoes of the little girls who danced in the chorus. Another landmark was the replacement of the little girls and their floppy bows with very tall, non dancing girls who strutted with a kind of kangaroo hesitation step and were known as showgirls or long-stemmed American beauties. 

I simply mean to impress on you, without seeming to be superior, that I normally would use the word 'landmark' to describe something like the arrival on the scene of Adolf Hitler or the first man on the moon. 

Well, 'Pacific Overtures' is the most ambitious, the bravest, and it seems to me the most enchanting breakthrough in American musical comedy since 'Oklahoma'. 'Oklahoma' banished once for all – let's hope – both the floppy little girls and the long-stemmed beauties and made the revolutionary demand on all subsequent chorus boys and girls that they should learn modern ballet. That was enough to send people out of the theatre saying and knowing that musical comedy would never be the same. I don't quite know where to begin in listing the innovations in 'Pacific Overtures'. You have to go back and recall the procession of changes in American musical comedy over, let's say the past 60 years. Let's briefly do that. 

The first shocking novelty, in my time, was the replacement of roistering plots about Ruritania and big-bellied kings of Burgundy by plots about young Americans of independent means who were fond of platoons of girls in white bathing suits. Now this sounds like trading one sort of silly plot for another and so it was. But they couldn't stay with desert songs and Ruritanian dukes because the music couldn't cope. The music that came rollicking in was the music of Jerome Kern and George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers. And so in the 1920s, the revolution was a musical one. It lasted certainly for 20 years. Then came 'Oklahoma' and more sensible and various plots and a little, but admirable breakthrough with Leonard Bernstein's 'On the Town'. 

Of course, you could say that in the past ten years, musical comedy has enjoyed a crashing breakthrough with the raging rock musical. I am deeply prejudiced in this matter and I'd better say that so far as I'm concerned, not too long after 'Kiss Me Kate' and 'South Pacific', musical comedy either vamped till ready on well-worn themes or suffered through the aforementioned rock orgy not a breakthrough, but a breakdown of the sort that Edward Gibbon chronicled in the Roman decadence as 'enthusiasm masquerading as originality'. 

Well, now you've already gathered that the plot of 'Pacific Overtures' is refreshingly intelligent and original. When I went to it, it happened to be the first night. I had no notion what sort of entertainment, if any, I was going to. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I imagined a poor man's 'South Pacific'. Imagine the shock of arriving to hear a plaintive flute and see, planted down stage left, two Japanese men and a Japanese woman plucking or piping on Japanese instruments, to find that the whole play is performed in the formal style of the Kabuki theatre, that all the cast is Japanese, including the jokers who represent the Americans, the British, the Russians and so on, that they move in their grave and decorative way against a shifting dream world of sliding screens and friezes that compose the most ravishing stage picture. And then, to sit back and listen to the music and lyrics of the most gifted, the most artful and serious of all composers for the American musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim. 

Mr Sondheim, who most recently wrote 'Company' and 'A Little Night Music', will not stay put in a profitable, commercial groove and he's to be honoured for it. He has absorbed the mood of Japanese music and adapted it to his mostly atonal idiom and this is where he may have come a cropper. On the assumption that the Broadway musical invites and delights people from New York and from Keokuk, Iowa, who are musical slobs, Mr Sondheim assumes that you've taken in through your eardrums the harmonies of Ravel and Debussy and on to Poulenc and Stravinsky and maybe Schoenberg, and then some. And this is asking a lot of high-paying customers. 

Mozart, after all, would not last a week at the box office in New York. He runs for a night or two at the Metropolitan Opera on a subsidy granted in the first place by, so to speak, Mrs Astor – a subsidy never large enough to cushion the monstrous fact that every time the curtain goes up, the Met loses $48,000. 

I hope I misjudge and belittle the chronic Broadway theatre goer. The first night of 'Pacific Overtures' was one of those very rare nights in the theatre when you feel that a whole generation of pleasant but clogging clichés has been shed like a skin when, as Handel put it, 'the people that walked in darkness, have seen a great light'. 

And I should like to think it will shine for legions of foreign visitors to New York and they will, therefore, renew their faith in the vitality of that remarkable 20th century invention, the American musical comedy.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.